Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday March 28, 2011 @04:13PM
from the not-a-wall-so-much-as-a-hurdle dept.

RedEaredSlider writes "As the New York Times' new paywall went live this afternoon at 2 p.m., discussion of the move has made the natural transition to methods of bypassing it. As expected, a number of loopholes and hacks have appeared. One of the more notorious methods appeared almost instantly. Using a Twitter account named @FreeNYT, an anonymous user aggregated every article the newspaper posted to Twitter. The site caught The Times' notice and before long, The Times requested that Twitter suspend the account, arguing that it violated its trademark. Another loophole uses four lines of CSS and JavaScript. Canadian developer David Hayes managed to strip the Times' website of any mention of digital subscriptions in addition to getting past the paywall. The hack was released in the form of NYTClean, a bookmarklet easily added to web browsers."
It's likely that the paywall is deliberately porous; as paywalls go, it's a relatively unrestrictive one. Readers referred from search or other sites are unlikely to notice a difference. Workarounds at least keep readers on their site.

I don't think they really care about workarounds. Most casual users wont bother with those but will buy a subscription if they feel like it's worth it. I wouldn't pay for NYT, but I sure could pay for a newspaper or a writer who I think is writing interestingly, informatively or studies the case. This is especially true on things like business and computer stuff, not so much everyday news.

for $3.75/week you can get a sunday NY paper delivered in the US, and that gives you a free on-line subscription. By itself the on-line subscription is 3.50/week. SO for less than the postage you get the delightful dead tree version too.

I don't use paper mulch in the garden, the pets don't like newspaper as litter as it has poor absorbency (let alone the mess the ink causes) and being responsible no crotchfruit that require diversions. So not fixed, still a hassle.

for $3.75/week you can get a sunday NY paper delivered in the US, and that gives you a free on-line subscription. By itself the on-line subscription is 3.50/week. SO for less than the postage you get the delightful dead tree version too.

I thought about that too, until I found out that for the D.C. metro area, that's the intro price and only good for 8-12 weeks. After that, it doubles to $7.50/wk. Last time I checked -- granted, it was several years ago -- the newsstand price for the Sunday NYT was only $5.00. (In my case, since I own a smartphone but no tablet, I would be better off taking the Sunday NYT for 12 weeks, then switching to digital.) I'd be curious to know what the NY/NJ/"home area" rate is compared to D.C., or if other parts of the country have cheaper "standard" rates.

Googling the story title will usually reveal the whole story minus the subscription notice.

Other sites that require simple registration can usually be circumvented with sites like bugmenot.

All in all, their attempts to embargo information will not easily be met unless those who produce the browsers and possibly the operating systems cooperate. In closed environments, iOs is a great example, they will have much better luck but even then as long as the support browsers in those environments ways abound.

Either that, or the fact that they've won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news organization.

And how many of those were for stories that were blatantly false? I know of two off of the top of my head. A Pulitzer prize only means that you told a good story that promoted the agenda shared by most reporters and passed it off as news.

...and they actually gain money from ad revenue, thanks to all the extra hubbub about their paywall. People ask themselves, "just what is so good about this news that people are willing to do anything to read it? Maybe I should check it out."

Or the readership goes down, as causal users encounter an obstacle and just browse to another site. Interested users, ones who actually might pay, just see how easy it is to bypass the wall and so have no incentive to pay. It's the worst of both worlds.

Uh, yeah. For about 8 minutes. Then the hubbub is gone and they're not getting any subscription revenue and part of their readership isn't showing up because it can't get the hack to work to get them through the paywall so their ad revenue projections come in way low.

NYT paywall is #fail of the year in the narrow category of online journalistic monetization. But nothing like Japanese reactor shutdown procedures, which are likely to hold the overall title to the end of the century.

"But nothing like Japanese reactor shutdown procedures, which are likely to hold the overall title to the end of the century."umm i don't exactly see the FAIL here

1 the reactors were "end of life" anyway2 they got hit by events OUTSIDE the plans (quick name me all of the quakes in that region 0.5 points below what they got hit with and greater)3 the reactors did in fact get shutdown4 the cores are more or less intact (but are of course now glowy scrap metal)

they got hit by events OUTSIDE the plans (quick name me all of the quakes in that region 0.5 points below what they got hit with and greater)

Nice fallacy there.
Just because you and I don't know the names, it doesn't mean that the engineers designing the plant didn't have to take other quakes into account.
Typical such a plant would have to have to be designed to withstand an event with a 1 in 1000 years frequency.

From interest I looked up a list of big earthquakes when the Japan one hit: USGS list [usgs.gov] - it was the fourth largest in the world since 1900. At a rough guess the chance of such a large quake hitting the area of the reactors would be lower than 1/1000, although the pacific rim is a very active area anyway. Right ballpark though.

1. they're certainly ending lives2. external events are what you plan for when you have something that could melt down and kill people; because if you have any internal events still waivered that could do that, you should be in jail before they happen3. the reactors got broken, not shut down; scramming the core and unplugging the grid isn't a reactor shutdown4. you either have radiaton wafting over the population, or you don't. there's no "more or less" about it.5. after a week, they got a cooling pump wor

The genius of the Times approach is that it actually might work because of the weaknesses. Instead of a pay wall that everyone would be striving to scale, they have a "pay hedge" where passers-by can see over, and view whatever they like. Only if they wish to stay a while and drink the tasty NYT lemonade (or kool-aid if you prefer) need they fork over some money to enter through the purely ornamental gate.

The other component the Times has to get right is pricing, and charge an amount of money that people think is fair for entering. But at least the Times is getting the part right about how to ask for money while still maintaining a presence on the web instead of going dark to casual readers. All else is just negotiating the right price with readers.

Uh, yeah, except the hedge has so many holes in it that people can continue coming in to drink the lemonade for free. If the Times notices that someone has had too many drinks this visit, they just have to change their hat and they can start drinking again.

Uh, yeah, except the hedge has so many holes in it that people can continue coming in to drink the lemonade for free. If the Times notices that someone has had too many drinks this visit, they just have to change their hat and they can start drinking again.

And yet people still give out free samples at supermarkets (and especially Costco).

Look, the point of this isn't to get the 0.1-1% of people who will go into the garden attempting to steal the lawn ornaments; it's to entice the other 99% to maybe kick in a few bucks for a membership, and make some extra money that way, while still not keeping people out who just want to visit. It's an intriguing idea, and I'd love to see data over the next few months/year about how well it does. If it goes well, the NYTimes

...And the problem is that by making the "few bucks" a truly, truly absurd number, the kind of number you have to be batshit crazy to pay them for online access that has more or less zero marginal cost to them to provide, they openly encourage people to work around it while failing to convince people -- like me, for example -- that we should fork over twenty-five cents an article in order to read the 3-4 articles that actually catch our notice in any given day. If they'd charged, say, $25 a year I'd have b

Uh, yeah, except the hedge has so many holes in it that people can continue coming in to drink the lemonade for free.

That's why I called it a hedge with an ornamental gate. Because anyone can just step over the hedge.

Yes anyone CAN. But the whole point is that most people do want to pay for content they enjoy, a fact Apple has proved beyond all doubt. I can obtain any music, and video content for free. But if there is a way to buy it I will do so despite that being the case.

Agreed, the price comparison the NYT used was "$15, less that the price of a martini in Manhattan," they aren't targeting people who are willing to twiddle with their browsers, they. (I tried to say as much on my 3 minutes on NPR this morning when they asked me about this)

The WSJ and other former print mavens have been using the above-the-fold-is-free model for a long time. I have never felt the need to issue coin to them to see what they've got next to the Gold Coin ads inside.

The genius of the Times approach is that it actually might work because of the weaknesses. Instead of a pay wall that everyone would be striving to scale, they have a "pay hedge" where passers-by can see over, and view whatever they like. Only if they wish to stay a while and drink the tasty NYT lemonade (or kool-aid if you prefer) need they fork over some money to enter through the purely ornamental gate.

Why would I want to when I can get the same news for free from other sources?

As long as things like the BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) have a mandate to provide free news pay walls will never work. All they will do is consolidate readers into sources that are not pay walled.

Pay walls will make people close that tab, if they want to know about the article, they'll google it and find a free alternative. The only organisations who could possibly benefit from pay walls are those "news"

For the same reason you go anyplace to get something when you can go somewhere else for the same thing.

Because you like how its done better there.

I consider quoting myself to be a bit pretentious but anyway, I pointed that out in my GP post.

The only organisations who could possibly benefit from pay walls are those "news" organisations who don't provide news as much as a comforting blanket of skewed information to people who don't want their views challenged.

For all products, a large number of people are not using your product exclusively. There is typically a lot of competition. Take washing powder, I've used the same one for years now, but if the price of BioZet shot up, why would I not change to a competing brand?

What would make the "news" industry any different?

Real world numbers of fanboys (lets face it, they are exactly what we are talking about here) are

What value are they trying to charge for? Is it out of force of habit from their previous business model? Yeah, advertising on a web-page may not seem like a viable business model profit-wise for them but the world has moved on: accept advertisements of smaller dollars because the fat subscription days are over. I will not pay for the New York Times. There is no value in it for me.

I do subscribe to the NYT and personally I feel, I do get a value out of the subscription. YMMV.

Their Sunday and Friday editions are enough to justify the price I pay to them, and I have found that they always keep me informed about the changes in their policies along with their justification.

Frankly speaking my customer experience with them has been rather satisfactory and quite a refreshing change from various different websites that take my data and impose arbitrary "shove it in your face, accept o

News is like porn. There are so many sources giving it out for free, unless there is something really specific you are looking for it's not worth paying. Oh and they are both usually about people getting fucked.

NYT probably has to keep the full page intact as opposed to keeping it from loading entirely, because otherwise Google's crawler would only be able to index 25 articles per month. Then they would start treating the Googlebot differently, and as that is against the TOS, Google would block their site.

So instead they serve the same pages, knowing Googlebot doesn't care about JS (hey, does disabling JS break the paywall?). So they adhere to the letter of Google's TOS and go against the spirit, which I'm sure they're fine with.

Yes, disabling JavaScript stops the paywall, so does disabling cookies or referrer spoofing. The only reason the media cares about my hack is the narrative of "3 lines of code over my lunch break" is more interesting than "the paywall doesn't work with certain browser settings".

Then they would start treating the Googlebot differently, and as that is against the TOS, Google would block their site.

Giving Googlebot a complimentary subscription isn't against the TOS if your publication is part of the Google Scholar program. I've had dozens of Google searches whose result pages were filled with articles behind the Elsevier, Wiley, SpringerLink, and JSTOR paywalls.

The only "work-around" I'd be inclined to install would be a DNS blackhole to make sure that I don't accidentally click on one of their links. It's not like there aren't other news outlets, and they all have the same or better quality stuff. I'd just as soon let their advertisers know in no uncertain terms that they're not getting my views or my clicks from that site. They can keep their paywall.

If the NY Times want to make themselves pay only I'm not going to go to the effort of bypassing anything or breaking any laws to read their content. I just don't care that much. Let them fade into insignificance as people get their news elsewhere.

It seems to me that like the music labels, many of the newspapers are still hung up on physical distribution of the product. The NYT allows a physical deliver for $14.80 a week. Weekend delivery is $10.80 a week, and Sunday delivery at 7.50 a week. As far as i can tell, all of these include digital access. The full access package, whatever that is, is 7 dollars a week. For fifty cents more I get the sunday newspaper.

Can we say a firm afraid to lose it's printing press? It is natural and even desirable for businesses to go away when they are unwilling to acknowledge that the time of the buggy whip is past and new forms need to be explored. I kind of applaud them for have a $4 and $5 a week option, but when compared with the $7.5 a week option with home sunday delivery, it seems kind of pricey. With the millions of ads on their web pages, and not having to set the pages, and not having to print the pages, I can't believe that a $2.50 plan is not possible. Sure the expenses of the physical paper still exist, but those should be paid by the readers of the physical paper. They are the one's paying $800 a year for delivery of the dead tree edition.

I like the financials time model better. It is simple and understandable. It is basically the same price, but the levels are clearer and it does not differentiate mobile viewing so much

Basically they're targeting the same market as Apple -- stupid people with too much disposable income who are willing to pay far too much for a mediocre product all for the ability to look cool and sophisticated while at trendy expensive coffee shops.

Says the stupid trendy person reading who comments on a mediocre technology site for attention and karma. Perhaps you're also doing it from a laptop in a coffee shop. Really though, if you're using anything other than Lynx on FreeBSD on a 486DX tower in your parents' basement then you're just as big of a stupid trend follower.

I think everyone is missing the point by talking about finding a hack or paying a fee. If the NYT want to get out of the business of publishing on the open web I support their decision. I will not longer read anything they publish, free or not.

Unless you are in the greater New York area you don't need the NYT. They consider themselves the "journal of record", but in the real world they are just another mainstream media news outlet, and there is nothing special about their coverage.

I can find everything I need to know without them. For international news I can go to English language sites of the regions that are closest to the story. The same goes for events in the US. Why read the NYT about the situation in Japan when you can go to Japanese sources and the Wikipedia?

I have found that both British news and Al Jazeera are as good, or even better then any US based new organization when it comes to international reporting. All US based news is dumbed down for the domestic market. And US mainstream media are incapable of honest reporting about right wing loonies because they are afraid of loosing viewers. This is one reason the birtherism and the fake controversy about Obama's citizenship is still makes big headlines.

So if the NYT doesn't want me to look at their stuff it's no big loss. I look forward to reading about their bankruptcy in other news forums.

Unless you are in the greater New York area you don't need the NYT. They consider themselves the "journal of record", but in the real world they are just another mainstream media news outlet, and there is nothing special about their coverage.

The NYTimes is generally considered one the major US newspapers of record, not just by themselves, but by anyone who ever has had to do research that used newspapers as sources.... You may not like the NYT, and that's fine, but dismissing them as a major source just makes you seem petty and ignorant.

I can find everything I need to know without them. For international news I can go to English language sites of the regions that are closest to the story. The same goes for events in the US. Why read the NYT about the situation in Japan when you can go to Japanese sources and the Wikipedia?
I have found that both British news and Al Jazeera are as good, or even better then any US based new organization when it comes to international reporting.

Because they generally have pretty good coverage? I don't just use one source for my news, and yes, reading local news is useful, but just because the NYT is based in NYC and, when bought in the NYC area has a

Just for fun I tried browsing the NY Times site over Tor. Sure enough, after 16 articles I got a message saying I only had 4 left and did I want to subscribe. I then shutdown and restarted Tor, and no more messages, even after going to articles 4, 5 and 6. It appeared I was getting another 20 articles. I stopped after 10 or so.
I don't know enough about the Paywall. Perhaps it starts counting the Tor exit nodes, and if enough people did the same thing, then those would quickly be exhausted I am pretty sure

Another loophole uses four lines of CSS and JavaScript. Canadian developer David Hayes managed to strip the Times' website of any mention of digital subscriptions in addition to getting past the paywall. The hack was released in the form of NYTClean, a bookmarklet easily added to web browsers.

Seriously? What developer is dumb enough to leave authentication for a paywall at the client-side?

Oh well, 40 million bucks (40-50 estimation from this bloomberg article [bloomberg.com]) doesn't buy much of a wall these days I guess.I wonder how many times did they have to re-write it from the scratch, what amount was spent on "market studies" ("Would you pay us $50 a month of online access? No? Whyyyy?") and how many pennies were spent on actual QA.

I'm at work so I can't youtube, so I can't see exactly what he said, but its pretty standard practice in journalism to allow people to comment on stories that are about them... perhaps his comments were misinterpreted. I would like to see the exact quote.

The NYT was one of the leaders in covering everything put out by Wikileaks. While the cable news networks were running with the "Is Assange a Rapist?" drek, the NYT had the leaks on front page week after week with in depth analysis of every file they could get their hands on. Are you telling me they got approval to cover all that stuff?

Using a Twitter account named @FreeNYT, an anonymous user aggregated every article the newspaper posted to Twitter. The site caught The Times' notice and before long, The Times requested that Twitter suspend the account, arguing that it violated its trademark.

That is incorrect. @FreeNYT wrote, "The @NYTimes took exception with @FreeNYTimes using their logo. @FreeNYT never did and was never shut down. #clarification."Source: http://twitter.com/FreeNYT/status/51326909027594240 [twitter.com] All this person did was creat

It looks like the 'NY Times' has learnt from the failure of 'The Times' in its paywall. Once Murdoch setup his paywall for those papers, they basically ceased to exist as far as online was concerned and their paper based readership fell the most out of all UK papers (11.7%). In essence the only way is down if you consciously pull up the drawbridge, since the quality is not high enough to get new readers to pay.
By making the paywall essentially voluntary, they get money from the dumb, but don't lose the smart. It won't save them, but its not going to be so fast a decline as it could be.

You felt the need to post that twice in the same thread? plus another comment to similar effect? It rather undermines the message when it looks like you've got some sort of personal axe to grind.... (and irritates me when your annoying comments that add nothing to the thread keep showing up as I scroll)

I live in LA, but I get the NY Times delivered in dead-tree format every morning. Recently I found, for the first time, that when I went to look at an article online, it mysteriously wouldn't render properly -- presumably because I have ad blocking software. I used to read a good article in the dead-trees paper while drinking my coffee, then email people the link. A lot of those people were presumably generating ad revenue for the NY Times. Now I just won't do that anymore. Who exactly is this helping?

I've been reading the NYT website for about as long as they have had one. I was reading it when the "website" consisted of a about a dozen image-map GIFs, each of which lead to eight or so stories.

In thanks for my sixteen years of freeloading, they have seen fit to grant me a free subscription! I was browsing the other day, and saw a Lincoln ad that also mentioned a free subscription. I clicked on the ad, figuring they'll want my e-mail address to send me some crap I'll simply delete (that's fine by me),

I have set my home page to http://www.google.com/ig [google.com] and have the NYT home page widget installed, and since the paywall went up I have read at least 70+ articles / slideshows / etc. since, and have not once seen a request for payment. I am using FF4 with Https-everywhere set to run the NYT pages that way. Could any of the above be a reason for the "loophole"? Cheers!